


No Words

by BiJane



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aromantic, Aromantic Doctor, Bittersweet, Character Analysis, F/F, Gen, The Doctor is an alien, Unrequited Crush, again kind of, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 10:29:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16871269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiJane/pseuds/BiJane
Summary: Loving the Doctor was never easy.





	No Words

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I could explain this. I have a weird relationship with Doctor/companion ships; I always like the dynamic, I rarely get fully invested for a whole host of reasons, and then sometimes ideas like this pop up in my head and here we are.   
> Bonus points for those that can spot the random references to DW things.

“I like you.”

Yasmin still wasn’t sure if that had been planned, or if it had just slipped out. She’d agonised for days about whether she was going to say it, how she’d say it, what she should do…

Culminating in promising herself that yes, she would say it, she wouldn’t keep pining in silence. And then she’d run back into the TARDIS alongside the Doctor, breathless and reeling and dizzy with the mad joy of it all, and the words fell from her lips without a second thought.

“Aww,” the Doctor tilted her head, smiling back at Yasmin. “I like you too Yaz.”

In hindsight she should have expected that reaction.

“No, I mean-” Yasmin began.

And then remembered to hurry forward, quickly interrupting the exchange. She barely noticed the Doctor’s expression shift.

Ryan and Graham sprinted into the TARDIS behind them, slamming the doors shut. The Doctor was already halfway to the console, giving a running jump towards one of the levers.

“Alright, lesson learned,” the Doctor said. “Check a planetoid’s stable before landing on it. Hopefully the next place we land won’t explode. Unless it’s a really cool explosion. And at a distance. Yeah, I like the sound of that.”

The engines of the TARDIS started groaning, and the juddering of the land beneath them was replaced with the somehow more comforting, and more violent, shaking of the time machine taking flight.

* * *

The TARDIS had been left materialised in the middle of empty space, somewhere considerably more stable than either the time vortex or the breaking-apart rock they’d just been on. The Doctor usually left them in places like that whenever they needed a rest.

Yasmin hadn’t asked what the Doctor got up to while they were sleeping; she’d never seen the Doctor retire to her room. She wasn’t even sure the Doctor had a room.

She crashed onto her bed, head hitting her pillow hard, and stared up at the roundels on the ceiling.

Well that hadn’t gone the way she’d expected. Note to self, actually plan it out properly next time, don’t just have it spill out in a random moment of-

“Uh, Yaz?”

There was a knock on her open door. Yaz sat up, scrambling slightly when she recognised the Doctor.

“H-hi,” Yasmin said.

She hesitated only briefly. Breathe in, breathe out. Ok, her confession hadn’t exactly worked, there was no reason to be awkward about it.

The Doctor walked in. She paused a few steps from the bed, lingering just out of reach.

“Earlier,” the Doctor said. “You- ugh, I’m terrible at this. You said something that sounded like… something.”

Oh.

“Um… yeah,” Yaz said. She shifted. “Not exactly how I planned for it to come out.”

“But you…”

“How could I _not_?” Yaz said. “You fall out of the sky, literally, save my life more times than I can count, admittedly put my life in danger about the same amount, and you show me the universe. Other worlds, the past, the good and the bad, and you’re always standing there with that _ridiculous_ grin and that assuredness that nothing’s going to go wrong.”

Yaz breathed in. Well she’d started now.

“It’s the best time of my life,” she said. “And a lot of that’s down to you. What you do, how you do it, I’ve pretty much got to care about you for that alone. I love how you see things, how you see the world, and I love travelling with you, and I… yeah, that’s more how I wanted to say it.”

Nervously, Yaz opened her eyes. She’d barely noticed when she’d screwed them shut.

It was hard to read the Doctor’s expression; there was a crease in her brow, a slight slackness to her jaw, something thoroughly unreadable in her eye… Yasmin couldn’t tell what it was.

Only that it wasn’t what she’d hoped to see. Which… figured.

She quickly hurried on.

“It’s ok if you don’t,” Yaz said. “I get it. Just thought I should say something.”

It might have been the longest she’d known the Doctor to be silent. Slowly, though, the Doctor moved closer.

“Yaz,” she said, voice soft. She screwed up her face. “I really hate it when this happens. I’m not good at… especially in this body.”

“I get it,” Yaz said. “Just say you don’t care, it’s fine.”

“I _don’t_ care,” the Doctor said.

Yasmin faltered. Somehow it still stung to hear; the Doctor swiftly continued.

“No! Oh, I’m really making a mess of this. No, I don’t care, I _can’t_ ,” the Doctor said. “It’s not like… Look at me, Yaz, please.”

Uncertain, Yasmin turned. It was hard to resist when there was that note in the Doctor’s voice.

“I can’t put how I feel into words,” the Doctor said. Her eyes widened at herself; “Yeah, that’s it, I like that. I can’t tell you how I feel. Like, literally, physically can’t.”

“What?” Yasmin hesitated. “I can deal with rejection Doctor.”

“It’s-” the Doctor said.

She closed her eyes for a long few seconds, pained. Eventually she opened them again, staring at Yasmin with an odd intensity.

“Can we start again?” the Doctor said.

“Uh… sure?” Yaz said.

There was a glimmer of the familiar smile, a curl of her lips that brought a light to her eyes that made Yasmin’s heart ache, as the Doctor closed the distance between them.

She slipped onto the side of Yasmin’s bed, sitting by her companion’s legs and meeting her eyes fervently.

“I’m not human,” the Doctor said. “First off. In case the time machine and two hearts and regeneration didn’t give it away. Things are… different, birth to deaths. Honestly I’m not even sure I _was_ born, things get weirder than you’d think.”

“What does this have to do with…”

The Doctor grasped one of Yasmin’s hands between two of her own. Her skin suddenly seemed heated.

“I don’t see the world like you do,” the Doctor said. “Literally, whole new senses and sides of the brain. But that means feelings aren’t the same either; I could try to translate them over, but honestly I probably shouldn’t even say I like you because it’s _not_ that, it’s not anything human. I act like it is sometimes, it’s easier for everyone, but if this happens I need to…”

The Doctor hesitated. She screwed up her face again, evidently not happy with how she sounded.

“I can’t love you, Yaz,” the Doctor said. “Like, physically, I can’t. It’s like asking a fish to walk on land. It’s not something I can do, just like I can’t ask you to feel…”

Her voice trailed off again. She lifted one hand to pinch her tongue, tugging on it experimentally, then groaning.

“Don’t have the words,” she said. “Even the TARDIS translation matrix can only cope with so much. It’s like… Like when you look at a star! Sure, I can see it, I can appreciate it, but it doesn’t compare to what you get to see. You see so much beauty, I see it in you. I always love that awe. You see something there I don’t, that I can’t. I don’t feel the same _stuff_ as you. It’s nothing to do with, well, anyone.”

“Oh,” Yasmin said. She hesitated. “So… what do you… feel?”

“No words,” the Doctor said. She smiled wistfully.

There was a moment of quiet. Yasmin shifted on her bed, not sure how to react.

Was that good or bad? The lack of closure was almost more of a torment than the plain rejection. Apparently, sensing that, the Doctor squeezed her hand.

“Did I mention I have a wife?” the Doctor said.

_That_ , Yasmin jumped at. Of all the reasons for the Doctor to say no, that definitely hadn’t been one she’d expected.

Ok, she knew the Doctor was older than she looked. How much older she hadn’t particularly wanted to ask. It was… feasible, it was just odd.

“You could have led with that!” Yasmin said.

“Oh, no, I don’t mean… she wouldn’t mind anyone I…” the Doctor said. Her voice trailed off. “I mean, she was… closer, genetically speaking. She saw the world more like me. Not completely, not totally, but we… It was centuries, and I only found out at the very end for all that time she didn’t believe I loved her, not like that, not in any way. She was still human, well mostly, she still kept expecting little signs and tells that I _couldn’t_ give. I… cared, I just… urgh! Language! Why’s it so bad at this?!”

Her voice raised for a moment. Then she swallowed and continued, softer.

“I can’t put into words how much I care about you,” the Doctor said fervently. “Completely off your frame of reference. Not more or less than you feel about me, just different, _way_ different. Is that, uh, good enough?”

Yasmin was staring.

The Doctor shifted, a little self-consciously. She brushed a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear, then peered back to Yasmin.

“Wow,” Yaz said.

The Doctor smiled nervously.

“What’s that like?” Yasmin said. “I mean, I know you can’t explain it. Just… I still want to know.”

“It’s…” the Doctor’s voice trailed off. Then, suddenly, she grinned. “How about a fairy tale?”

“What?”

“An old story,” the Doctor said. “Heard it a ways back.”

“Um, sure?”

The Doctor beamed.

“Back when my people first decided they were the protectors of time,” the Doctor said, “Way back in the early days, they fought back against everything that was a threat to history and the universe they’d established. They expelled all the dangerous threats, unnameable evils, the vampires, before-”

“The _what_?!”

“Oh, right, yeah, vampires are real,” the Doctor said absently. “Anyway, the story goes they wanted to get rid of one last danger. So Rassilon, the leader of them, reached into his own chest and pulled out his… irrationality, I guess you’d call it. That little _something_ that’s responsible for so much chaos, and he commanded that all his people do the same. So they lost it, those little twinkling lights swirling together and vanishing into the void of infinity, leaving us changed.”

The Doctor paused.

“Then that combined irrationality coalesced and tried to invade the universe and destroy history,” she said, matter-of-factly. “That kind of thing happens a lot.”

Yasmin blinked.

“Love’s irrational. At least for humans,” the Doctor said. “That’s what I always heard. We- I don’t… get that. There’s no separation, no heart and head, no rational and irrational, no order and chaos. It’s not as… deep, but it’s everywhere, when it’s there, but it’s still not like… urgh. There go the words again. Don’t suppose you’ve got a spare century to learn Gallifreyan?”

“…Probably not a century,” Yasmin said.

The Doctor breathed out, frustrated with herself.

“I can’t be what you want, not like that,” the Doctor said. “It doesn’t work, not for me. Sometimes I wish it did, just so I could see the same way you do, but it doesn’t. I guess that’s all I wanted to say. If you still want to travel-”

“Definitely,” Yaz said.

The Doctor beamed at her.

Even if she loved the Doctor just a little bit more now. It always happened whenever she heard her talk, whenever she got lost in what she was saying.

It didn’t matter if she returned it in the same way, not really.

“I could show you,” the Doctor said suddenly.

“What?” Yasmin said.

“I… if you wanted,” the Doctor said. She lifted a hand; “I could let you in, let you see. I don’t know if it’d make any sense if that’s the part you get, but you could try.”

“Sure,” Yaz said, a little too quickly. “I think.”

The Doctor smiled, maybe a little too eagerly, and moved her hand to Yaz’s temple.

And then Yaz was falling.

They weren’t images, she knew that instinctively, just that her mind could only read them as images. She saw a star, icy blue, that somehow burned cold as it illuminated the darkness of space around it.

She felt its gravity, drawing her into orbit, making her lose control as she circled, drawn inexorably closer to the shining blue. Somehow, though she could feel the cold, it never seemed to permeate. Something kept her warm, kept her comfortable.

She span, faster and faster, and the cold and warmth filled her all at once. It was… all-consuming wasn’t the right word, it was too mild a descriptor. This feeling was… everything.

The Doctor was right; it was unrecognisable as any emotion, unrecognisable as anything more than sheer intensity.

Uncontrolled, thrilling, blissful intensity. A spark of impossibility giving light and, somehow, comfort.

One second later, the Doctor withdrew her hand. Yaz was panting.

“Is that…” the Doctor said.

For a moment Yasmin looked up, and when she did she saw more than one figure sitting there. She glimpsed shadows, an absence where a shadow would be, outlines and echoes stretching off into the distance and staying in the same place all at once.

And then the afterimage faded and it was just the Doctor sitting there, looking at Yaz with a flicker of nervousness unlike any Yasmin had seen on her face before, even when their lives had been in danger.

There was still a glimmer around her, a sense still tingling at the back of Yasmin’s mind that the woman she could see was somehow so much _more_. But if she looked with just her eyes she saw the Doctor seem remarkably small, vulnerable.

“Thank you,” Yasmin murmured. “I… don’t understand. But I see.”

Slowly, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief. She shifted, moving closer.

She murmured something that wasn’t quite a whisper, wasn’t quite words. The susurrations seemed to echo, something primal in Yasmin remembering them even when her mind couldn’t make sense of them.

“What was that?” Yasmin said.

“The right words,” the Doctor said. She suddenly seemed happy. “Wrong language, but I knew I could find them.”


End file.
